Happiness

I am absolutely delighted as I have had more than 4000 hits although I haven't posted since the 2012 Olympics. Now I am ready to jump into the postings game once again with a 2013 series. Sir Haulway Barrack- Jones has been dispatched to the Michael Burns Kennedy Tales Tales site, while this one is reserved for stage, performance, film and the occasional visual arts. I'll keep the old boy on the  address below and make this one more legit.
http://makingwhoopee.blogspot.com.au/

A Post with a View



 Colette Mann (left) and  Roxanna McDonald cross the human divide while (below)  Cirque Du Soleil go up the wall



Barrack-Jones: Warm Love & Big Leaps

Head Full of Love. Stars Roxanne McDonald and Colette Mann. Queensland Theatre Company. Cremorne Theatre QPAC. Till August 11.

Ovo. Cirque Du Soleil. Hamilton. 54 artists from 16 countries. Till September 2^nd.

Barrack-Jones rounding off a busy week with a quick look at two shows with strikingly contrasting styles and themes, but equally deserving of attention in this busy theatrical scene.

Alana Valentine’s Head Full of Love is a two-woman show, which explores the need for communication and understanding in a world where there’s too little of the damn stuff.

I mean we all – in theory – speak the same language here in Australia, but dash it all if sometimes it would seem that we’re living half way up - or maybe at the top - of the tower of Babylon.

We’re talking to each other right enough – sometimes shouting even – but the words seem to come out in a torrent of strange tongues, which inevitably fail to hit the mark.

Tilly Nappuljari (Roxanne McDonald) and Nessa Tavistock (Colette Mann) would appear to be worlds apart, when they come across each other at the annual Alice Springs Beanie Festival, but somehow manage to connect in a an engaging and amusing 90-minute conversation.

Big city girl Nessa is running away from a host of demons, while Roxanne is calmly knitting a beanie for the festival while coping with the trauma of spending four hours a day - three days a week - on a dialysis machine away from country and family.

Roxanne’s indigenous heritage makes it more than four times likely that she would be in this precarious situation, despite the fact that her life has been largely drug and alcohol free.

It’s something that’s simply in the indigenous DNA, but that doesn’t make her a push over and the women experience a sometimes feisty, but ultimately rewarding relationship.

Despite the subject matter, Head Full of Love is alive with good humour and is as likely to bring a smile to the lips as much as a tear to the eye.

There’s even a design for a zig zag beanie among the promotional material for the play, which is something of a triumph for all concerned including QTC artistic director Wesley Enoch who put this little masterpiece on stage.

So see the play and then head off to Alice Springs for the beanie festival when it pops up again next year.

These remote communities need our support in areas such as community health.

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Barrack-Jones is more often than not driven up the wall when it comes to the circus, but as most of the world knows Canada’s Cirque Du Soleil is in his a class of its own.

The crew have been coming to Australia – and Brisbane - since 1999 and this time around it’s brought a piece called Ovo (that’s Portuguese for egg) , which is a little strange as the two hour extravaganza focuses on the world of insects.

A cast and crew of more than 54 young athletic men and women, from 16 countries, present a spectacularly entertaining night of Olympic proportions on the floor, in the air and even up the wall.

Cirque Du Soleil exists in a parallel universe where anything is possible as the young bodies in stylish – but familiar – Cirque Du Soleil costumes throw themselves around without doing themselves damage (a miracle me thinks).

It’s a day in the life of insects – bugs, ladybirds, fleas, dragonflies, mossies etc – working, eating, crawling, fluttering, fighting and even falling in love.

The love story is left to the clowns, which is an interesting thought.

The action begins with the arrival of a stranger carrying an egg comes into their mist in what the circus folk call the enigma and cycle of life.

The first and second acts both end with two of the most remarkable displays that Barrack-Jones has ever seen under the blue and yellow  Big Top.

Those four young men under the New Jesry street light who would become The Four Seasons. Frankie Valli (second from left). 

Barrack-Jones: Sherry Baby or Sherry Bottle? Or Both?

Jersey Boys –The story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Music Bob Gaudio. Lyrics Bob Crewe. Lyric Theatre Brisbane. Tickets available until September 16.

Barrack-Jones here musing on that proverbial literary line from my old pal LP. Hartley who scribbled down ‘the past is a foreign country they do things differently there.’

That might be true of the distant past but strangely enough recent times – such as the 1960s – seem more like an alien world even though I was screwing around then (and I do mean that in a poet sense).

I remember walking through New Jersey in the fall of ’62 with a sassy girl on my arm and the prospect of seeing a movie and, perhaps later, winning her over with an ice cream bar.

The whole seduction was likely to cost 76 cents for two movie tickets – I think the film was  the sci-fi frightener The Blob – and an ice cream for 11 cents (I’d brought my own cream sherry hip flask).

 As we walked I heard four young men singing under a street light something about Sherry and wondering if they’d guessed what was in my  pocket.

Their Sherry was a girl, who had been woven into a song by Bon Gaudio for a new singing quartet The Four Seasons, and it was number one in what was then called the hit parade.

Now 50 years and 75 millions record sales later the boys are being recreated on stage in Brisbane in a celebration of their chequered story simply called Jersey Boys.

The show is the 19^th longest running Broadway musical and has won a swag of awards including best musical in New York (a Tony) and London (an Olivier).

The songs are almost pumped out in heart racing fashion as one hit falls over another in a remarkable musical cavalcade which includes December ’63 (Oh What a Night), Ragdoll, Big Girls Don’t Cry. Walk Like a Man and the fifth most played tune on the wireless Can’t Take My Eyes of You.

The show would be a terrific concert with the songs alone, but it appears that these squeaky clean lads in button down shirts, drain pipe pants, neat ties and tight coats lived extremely colourful and sometimes dangerous lives

I know the feeling.

Their story, which includes violence, sex, profanity, murder and even jail along with runs-in with gangsters and on the home front, girlfriends and  families, reminds me of the time when we took our stories from the Bible.

Only the Old Testament – as demonstrated in the middle-ages in shows such the Wakefield Mystery Plays – had as much sex and violence and in-your-face confrontation as Jersey Boys.

When we toured our mystery plays, all those years ago, they were touted as objects of lessons in morality, but nowadays these melodramatic real-life stories are more a demonstration of how talent wins out over adversity.

(Oh how I miss the Middle Ages, although they were home to some of our most smelly centuries, but I digress.)

The boys, as depicted in the show,  have their up and downs – and three of them finally drop-out for various reasons – but the songs carry on (as does Frankie Valli) and everyone comes out of it smelling of roses.

As indeed my sassy friend and I did rolling around in the garden rose beds after the movie as the four boys’ mournful harmonies could still  be heard in the near distance.

Ah now romantic.

I believe that now Mr. Valli is 78 – and still playing somewhere – but yours truly (The Universal Thespian) is also just warming up and looking for new possibilities despite 1000 years on the road

I think I might return to the Lyric for another dose of Jersey Boys and see if maybe….Well there was a rather attractive young waitress in the foyer  bar ….but never you mind about that (as they say in Queensland). 



Sir Haulway Barrack-Jones (above left) relaxing in a concentrating mood and the actor in character as Charley's Aunt (from Brazil where the nuts come from) in a dress rehearsal for the '95 summer tour



 

Above Madam Bovary's knockin' shop off London's Cromwell Road in Robbers Lane  (according to Barrack-Jones).  



Top: The Gentlemen of Japan
Right: Sully (left) and Gilly
Bottom: The beautiful Ruby Preece in '28